Choreographer Bill T. Jones is the executive artistic director of New York Live Arts. He said he first read Baldwin when he was 17, and was struggling with his own identity as a gay, African American man.

"My own sexuality was trying to amount itself, so it was very repressed, and here was a man writing in the most bold terms about race, and class, and sex, and all of those things. It was breathtaking," he said.

Jones believes most of Baldwin's work is still relevant today. He said he tried to read his book Giovanni's Room three times before, but just finished it this year.

"It took me a while to have the courage and the maturity to understand that the book transcends the specificity of its era, but even then I wondered what he and I would have said about the issue of gay liberation," he said.

Baldwin died in 1987.

Tags:

More in:

Gisele Regatao is the Senior Editor for Culture for WNYC News, where she reports, edits and curates features, news and criticism across the creative arts and the sweeping intellectual terrain that make New York one of the most fascinating places in the universe.

Feeds

WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio
stations, broadcasting the finest programs from NPR, PRI and American Public Media, as well as a wide range of award-winning local
programming. WNYC is a division of
New York Public Radio.